Smoke
by Capella Alpha Aurigae
Summary: Gil sits alone on Emphaza's slope. Snow. Tears. Fire. But most of all, regret. Mainly angst, but there is Gillaam at the end. Meaning, shounenai.


A/N: Angsty Gil fic…Sort of symbolic, poetic language, with Gillaam (SHOUNEN-AI) at the end. Apologies to those who dislike Laam's English name. Oh, and I forgot to put this last time…I don't own Dragon Knights. Not sure why that needs to be stated, but…Anyway, please read the story, and review if you like.

Smoke

Snow covered the ground on the mountain, and evergreen leaves just peaked out from under their white caps. Nothing disturbed the cold white icing, except for the twin indentations of boot soles, curving their trail ever farther up Emphaza, like Theseus's magic thread winding through the Labyrinth.

Gil, brother of the keeper of the mountain lodge, tread slowly and resignedly through the trees. He listened to the crunching of the snow under his feet, and watched his breath turn to icy mist in the air. He didn't have a coat, or anything other than his usual clothing. All he had was a lantern, not for light or even heat, but only for its fire.

He stared at the wavering flame, and saw his brother Barl's face when he had handed Gil the lantern. A worried face. _You might as well be the older brother, the way we tell everyone_, thought Gil, with a short laugh that did not make him feel any better. It was said that Fortune wore a blindfold. He wasn't sure, himself, because there was something deliberately ironic about this situation. Barl, the younger brother, had the lodge, and his daughter, and a reason to live, because he was human with human dreams and a human life. Gil, the elder, had only an ice cold mountain, and the curse of immortality. Because he was a demon. It was as though his memories had been dyed in blood, so as to be stained with shadows, and his dreams were so rotten, they fell to pieces at the slightest touch. All by chance, this had happened to him. Who could say that somewhere, Fortune wasn't laughing at her joke?

He shook his head sharply. _Jealously_, he reminded himself, _Jealously the green-eyed monster. It doesn't do any good to be jealous._ But was there a point to being good, anymore? He was already as damned as any of the demons he had met. Probably more so than some. Killing innocent people wasn't something easily forgiven. He didn't actually remember doing it, but sometimes there was a terrible pain, and then the next thing he knew he was in the forest, lying on the ground, no memory of how he'd gotten there. And when he got back to the lodge, Barl told him that the mountain demon had been killing villagers again. Hardly a coincidence.

Barl didn't know that his brother was a demon. The reason Gil had disappeared for years, the reason he never aged, Barl thought it was due to a simple curse. Gil wished terribly that it was. When he lost his humanity, he lost everything. When he'd finally come back here, to Mt. Emphaza, he found that home wasn't home anymore, and he wasn't the same as he had been. He was the younger brother now, the one who knew too much, but had nothing to show for it at all.

He was high up on the slope now, and the trees were clearing out. In one clearing he found his shed. It wasn't actually a shed, but that was the closest word. It was built of rocks, and it kept firewood safe from snow like this. He came up the mountain frequently, whenever he couldn't take it down at the lodge anymore. When his secrets and his guilt started to suffocate him, when he could no longer abide the innocent love of Fiji, his little niece, whose mother was now gone because of him, he lost himself on the mountain slopes. He had this place for these times. When it was cold. And he needed a fire.

He cleared away snow, but the ground was still wet, and his fire stayed small. It licked up around the wood, bright as his eyes could stand, emblazoning the air in its sacred fire-color, its sparking lighting up, vanishing, the smoke curling up into the heavens, his SOS to whatever was up there. It hadn't worked yet.

Gil stared at the fire, watching it grow and die and grow again. Fire represented passion, willpower, energy, destruction, rebirth…the list went on. He couldn't see that. Fire meant something else to him. Fire meant broken promises. Fire meant regret. Fire was a predator, ever stalking its prey, which was the whole world. Nothing as glorious as destruction, simply consummation. The fire lapped at the wood like the ocean on the shore. For a while the wood would remain serene, untouched, only blackened. But gradually, it gave in. The fire sank into its pores and sparked, grew, spread through it until the wood burned high into the sacrificial smoke, spreading the fire on, until at last it burned out, completely consumed, nothing but dry black charcoal, tainting everything it touched. Dead.

For a moment Gil had the urge to drown the fire in the snow, bury it so it could never work its treacherous magic again. But no, it was too late. _There's another kind of fire_, he thought, _the fire that's inside me. Already deep inside me, burning me alive. And spreading. And there's nothing I can do about it_. He added more wood. The fire was betrayal. It laughed at him as he fed it, but he couldn't laugh back. Inside, his chest ached softly, constricting him throat, and stinging his eyes. His eyes watered, but he just wiped them with his hand and pretended it was only the smoke irritating them. The fire was his sorrow, his lost humanity.

Gil huddled into the snow, before his fire. He was alone, both too hot and too cold. The fire sparks flew up into the sky. His tears. He was alone. He hated to cry. It didn't help, just made him feel all the more sorry for himself. Because he was alone. He gave up, and just let tears roll softly down his face, an unearthly warmth against his cold-numbed cheeks. He sigh-sobbed, feeling again the tear-like warmth of an embrace he'd last felt long ago. Remembrance was enough to rend his heart again.

_Laam, Laam, Laam…Where are you now? Do you hate me?_ In his head, his voice was petulant as a small child's. Alone and scared. He knew, somewhere inside him, that the answer was "No." Laamgarnas had taken in a beast, and given it his care, protection, love. It had loved him, the one who had saved it from the pain, the torture that had become its life. That soft scent, the one with kind eyes, gentle hands, and that tear-warm embrace which was safety. Gil knew that, when Laamgarnas died, the shock on his face passed quickly. He must have laughed at himself for trying to tame a creature that couldn't tame itself, and then felt sorrow. Sorrow for his murderer, the one he loved, who couldn't love back as humans or demons or dragons or faeries love, couldn't do or be what he needed to be, because his will and his soul had been sealed away in a beast's mind. And only then, when Laam's eyes went dark, the beast became Gil again, and knew everything that he'd lost.

Gil bit his lip to stop the sobs, but tears continued to come from his eyes. He was alone. No longer human, he didn't belong. And his only hope to live as a demon was gone. Laamgarnas was gone forever. Laam, open heart and open arms. Gone. Gil's vision was blurred as much by his guilt, fear, misery, as by the smoke from the fire. But he still deserved the pain. Yes, he did. He'd murdered his heart, and it was his own fault. That's what he told himself. _You get what you pay for. Murderer. Murderer. I wish I'd die. But I'm too cowardly to die. I just go on living for no good reason. Bastard…you killed him, you killed Laam. This is what you get._

As he raged at himself, the fire burnt itself out. Sparks and smoke ascended to the sky, along with all his silently screamed words. It guttered out and he felt asleep there in the snow. The next morning Barl and Fiji would find him and take him to the lodge and wrap a blanket around him and give him hot milfy to drink. They'd worriedly ask what he had been doing up there, and he wouldn't say anything, just stare into his mug and resign himself to silence. But that night, while he lay on the mountain slope, a star fell, like a tear or a kiss, from the sky.


End file.
